SAP likes Eclipse Runtime Technologies
A few weeks ago I told you about the Eclipse RTP project. Since then some things happened that I want to share with you.
First of all, we made it to the creation review. The review is scheduled for January 12-19. The community gathering period was very successful. We reached 10 interested parties and 7 initial committers from three different companies. In this article, I’d like to focus on one very cool thing. It’s the effort made by SAP.
As you might have seen in the last months, SAP is involved in more than the half of the new Eclipse projects. Probably the main reason behind this is that SAP submitted the most project proposals ;). But reading about it and getting in touch with the guys behind this company are two different things as we learned in the RTP project. So, let’s review the SAP + RTP story:
In December a colleague of mine, Florian Waibel, made his way through closed airports and meters of snow to South Hampton, UK to have a face-to-face meeting with the Virgo guys. During this meeting he also talked about RTP and gained some interest from some of the people there. Back home he told me about SAP getting heavily involved in Virgo and also about their interest in RTP. Because we are an open Eclipse project we got in touch with a friendly SAP project manager (thanks Krassi) and had discussions about the RTP project and how an internal development project from SAP could fit into RTP. Well, the result was that SAP was so interested that we extended the scope of the project together and will now receive an initial contribution from SAP called the “p2 installer”. Of course, Eclipse is not a software dumping area. That’s why they will provide a maintainer for this contribution who will also be an initial committer. Welcome Georgi Stanev ;).
The “p2 installer” is basically a command line interface for the official p2 installer to manage remote Eclipse runtime installations. The purpose of this tool was to enable automated scripts to install Eclipse runtime to remote systems. The cool thing about it is the ability to define the units that should be installed in a property file declaratively. Yesterday we had a short demo of the installer and I have to say that it looks very exciting.
To put it all in a nutshell it’s really good to see SAP working actively in and with the open source community. They are not shy about donating things and providing guidance. It’s very nice to see a really big player supporting open source in positive ways.